


moments (that never happened)

by anstaar



Series: of this and that [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comment Fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22326661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstaar/pseuds/anstaar
Summary: collection of AU vignettes set in the Doctor Who Universe (1. the Doctor never quite manages to get Barbara and Ian home-purely by accident of course)
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams, Ian Chesterton/Barbara Wright, Martha Jones/Riley Vashtee
Series: of this and that [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/24643
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	1. what makes a home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: the Doctor never quite manages to get Barbara and Ian home-purely by accident of course

They get married on Mars. It’s during the Sixth Epoch, a time of peace and culture and parties that last for three days without end. They’ve joined a travelling caravan of performers making their way across the country, stopping in each town and village to put on a show and spread the luck. There’s no hurry, no plan, no disaster. They pause for a while in a small mountain hamlet. Vicki teaches Steven, and the young locals, some dances from her time. The Doctor puts on a display with the fireworks he’s modified that doesn’t end up with anything important on fire. Barbara takes Ian’s hand as they sit under foreign stars and neither of them has to say a word. The local priest conducts the ceremony, Ian’s arm is broken, and Barbara is wrapped in the red skirts their friends in the caravan have happily produced and claim are necessary for even an alien wedding. It’s nothing like they could have ever imagined. It’s everything they could ever want. 

Maybe that’s when they give up on going home. Maybe they already had, and this is just how they’re celebrating it. Because they could’ve gotten on that Dalek spaceship. They could’ve have gone back. This is a celebration, not a failure. This was a choice.

Vicki has dragged Steven onto the dance floor and the Doctor is muttering to himself as Sara stares. They both think of people who aren’t there, but they’re grateful for all that are there. All those they would’ve never met in a different world, if they’d made a different choice that night in the junkyard.

Doctor claims he’s getting better at navigating but Barbara’s privately sure it’s the TARDIS itself that’s behind their more relaxing landings while she’s pregnant. Maybe that’s why they don’t leave. There’s danger, of course, but there’s danger everywhere and Barbara rather likes giving birth in a twenty-fifth century hospital. She certainly doesn’t feel any of the discomfort she grew up hearing about and Beatrice is probably healthier than any baby born on Earth during the ‘60s. They all take turns holding her. Ian smiling so much she’d be afraid he’s going to hurt himself, but she knows he’d think it’s worth it. Vicki announces that she’s decided she definitely never wants to have a baby herself but beams at Bea with the same affection she shows her alien pets. Steven and Sara are both slightly awkward (for slightly different reasons, she suspects) but they hold her in turn. The Doctor sheds a few tears (and spends half an hour complaining about dust), even before they tell him her middle name.

When Ben and Polly dash into a police box they find practically a family home. 

Barbara and Ian live longer than anyone might expect, especially considering when they’re from. Everyone comes to say goodbye. It might be considered an odd gathering, if the small settlement hadn’t gotten used to the Wright-Chesterton (for some reason written down as ‘Chesterin’ in a crabbed hand on the land rights) family. There are all of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren (and a great-great grandchild in her father’s arms), drawn back to one place and time from where they scattered. Then there’s the family not of blood – Steven with his arm wrapped around Vicki; Ben and Polly’s children; the new family of the TARDIS who mostly only know of them through stories. 

The Doctor sits by the grave, once everyone else has gone. Not the Doctor they had known, not one that would be recognized by anyone else there, except maybe Susan and Alex (but they can see things differently), but he had to be here. They set a precedent. They were the first. He doesn’t know who he’d be if they’d left, if he hadn’t come to think of the TARDIS as a place to gather a large and sprawling family. A wise Time Lord doesn’t spend too long thinking on who they could’ve been. He leaves behind a flower made from Martian silk, a thank you for who he is.


	2. better late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: the Doctor didn't take 12 years to get back to Amy--he took 21 years

There’s a girl sitting in the kitchen. For a moment the Doctor congratulates himself on his excellent timing, new body barely broken in and a TARDIS with fires just extinguished and he’d still made it back just a little later. From the light streaming in the window it appeared to be around 9ish, using an era appropriate human unit of time. Then he looks back at the girl. The Doctor has a good memory; the Doctor has a _great_ memory, especially for people. 

Amelia Pond: small human girl, red hair, wellies and Scottish. This is definitely a different girl. He stares at her. She stares at him. She’s holding a piece of toast in one hand. Not-Amelia Pond is a couple years older, her rather curly hair is a sort of brownish red and she’s wearing a school uniform. Another head suddenly emerges from beneath the table _another_ not-Amelia Pond, a small and rather grubby boy with the same hair as his sister. The Doctor considered the scene and decided that, for once, departure might be the better part of valor. That was when Amelia Pond walked into the kitchen. This was definitely Amelia Pond and it definitely wasn’t a small child. The Doctor began to suspect that he had gotten the time a little off. 

The Doctor and Amelia (Amelia, again, she says with a look that suggested Complications he isn’t ready for) sit at the kitchen table. Mel and Val have been scooted out of the room and towards getting ready for the day with parental efficiency. He’s been handed a plate of bacon with the same cool efficiency, which is slightly alarming if you’re still expecting fish-fingers and custard but better than yelling.

“I worked for UNIT,” she says, “there was this incident, up at the hospital where Rory works, and I got a bit…involved and the next thing I knew I was being recruited. And the next thing I knew after _that_ was learning that my imaginary friend wasn’t exactly imaginary. And that he always had terrible timing.” 

There isn’t really much he could say to that. He makes a note that he has rather a lot he can say to UNIT next time he runs into them. Give an organization a way to contact you and this is what he gets in return.

Amelia introduces him to her family. The Doctor finds he doesn’t mind, that’ s another thing sorted out about this regeneration, then. There’s the Rory Pond (husband, nurse, unsurprised by guests, even those that he used to play make pretend as he was rescued) and the two mini-Ponds (Melody and Valiant, really, he’s obviously more polite than he thought he was going to be because he refrains from saying anything about that) and vague noises about other relatives that thankfully don’t appear. He doesn’t seem to mind family, but that seems a bit much on a short acquaintance.

There’s a few pauses in the conversation that speak of undercurrents he isn’t sure if he wants to see more clearly, but they’re filled immediately by the most useful small Pond, Mel always has something to say (he smiles at her and nods and hopes that she won’t say anything about computers because everyone’s done a good job at not looking at him like he’s mad). Amelia has a job at UNIT. Rory is employed as a nurse. They’re responsible parent type people. Mel and Val have school, though Mel assures him eagerly that they don’t have the moment, her brother apparently used to her speaking for both of them. 

He looks around the table as they fall into another of those pauses. 

“Would you like to go on a trip in a spaceship?”


	3. a hundred years on (I’m still here)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Rory as a Time Lord – the Centurion

He’s a gate keeper. Not a particularly impressive job, what with the transduction barriers up and infallible (apart from a few instances that polite people don’t talk about) but it’s a family job and perfect for a young Time Lord deeply ill-suited to politics. He actually rather enjoys it. He has a stance and a staff and has spent a hundred and fifty years being stolid and dependable while nothing happens. He likes it much more than school where he had to constantly work to evade getting caught up in any of the decade long feuds his classmates liked to form as practice for politics. He isn’t any good at the arts and he’s too emotional for the sciences and while pretty much everyone is scornful of his ceremonial position it gives him time to read and to run his experiments and to just have a nice think.

He’s considering how long he’ll have to keep his post before he’ll be the Gate Keeper (capital letters dropping like stone) and whether it would help if he managed to regenerate into an older looking body (he had done well in his regeneration theory class and while he could wait for this body to grow older, so far it had seemed rather stubbornly resistant to ageing) when the alarms go off. He’s conscientious enough to have read through all the guides and has plenty of free time in which to do so, to recognize it as the blare of an unauthorized TARDIS materializing mixed with the beeps of a stolen TARDIS returning along with the grating of a machine that could do with retirement or at least a good servicing. He doesn’t bother calling for backup. He’s grown up hearing about the Doctor; rebel, criminal, president, traitor, vagabond, hero of the Time War, and at this point (he thinks quietly and far away from everyone else) if the Doctor decided to become an enemy to Gallifrey there wasn’t much that could be done about it. 

He doesn’t know what to expect but he doesn’t want to start out calling the guard or just generally acting like an idiot in some other way. The Doctor isn’t his idol (there are few things he finds less appealing than the idea of being a renegade and he does know the destruction the follows in his wake) but he’s still…the _Doctor_ and that means something. He’s done more than enough to deserve any help he can get. But for all the stories, for all of actually having been in one of Tutor Leela’s classes, he isn’t expecting the woman who steps out of the TARDIS first.

He’s not sure if he should be grateful it wasn’t the Doctor he ended up gaping at or be embarrassed that he’s acting so stupidly in the face of one of the Doctor’s human companions. The Doctor doesn’t seem to notice, talking about messages and dead ships and can anyone on Gallifrey handle a simple task, even as the human – Amy – smirks far too knowingly at him. She manages to keep it up even as the end up running down the corridors of the citadel, trying to avoid time ghosts while the Doctor does something brilliant and amazing and whatever it is that makes people as vivid as Amy want to travel with him. He can remind himself of her humanity and his own status all he wants, but he knows the truth of it is that there’s not a single chance she would stay if he asked. 

In the end, he’s not sure just how oblivious the Doctor is. Amy was the one who pauses in the doorway of the TARDIS as they make it to the office ahead of the guards, she gave him an expectant look, even as she asked “Are you really planning on sticking around here, Rory?” 

But when he finds himself following her in, even as he kept telling himself that he’s abandoning his proper place, and is still trying to tell her that that’s not his name – 

There’s something very knowing in the Doctor’s smile.


	4. the answer is

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Martha/Riley Vashtee, after ‘42’ Riley comes along on the TARDIS with them

“The ships done in,” Martha says. The Doctor looks away. “He helped save our lives,” she prods.

“One trip,” the Doctor says.

Maybe she wishes he would talk to her about what happened instead, but Martha is nothing if not sensible, so she smiles at Riley and whispers, “He always says that.”

That one trip, to drop Riley off on a bustling space hub, goes south when they end up a century into his past where the Doctor stumbles upon a plot to start a war and is promptly kidnapped. Martha and Riley spend the next few hours attempting to rescue him and being rescued in return. They kiss in a dark corridor and run down several well-lit ones. By the end of the day, they’ve stopped a system wide crisis, Martha’s saved the life of the governor with only a pair of scissors, Riley managed to hack into the computer to broadcast the corporation’s plans to everyone and the Doctor has a speculative gleam in his eye. 

For the third trip they end up on Mars (Ancient Mars to Martha, the Doctor says) during a national holiday. It’s actually quite fun. Martha and Riley wander through the festival hand in hand while the Doctor bounces around like an excited child at a fun fair. In a rather surprising twist, nothing goes wrong. Martha and Riley sample as many foods as they can and talk about the games they had grown up with while the Doctor shows a group of children how to win at s’rett. The owner of the game is more amused than annoyed and invites them over for a meal. They end up staying for the rest of the holiday week. 

Fifth trip they end up in the middle of a war. They get mistaken for the ambassadors for peace which is understandable considering the real ambassadors are lying dead in a spaceship and the Doctor took their passes. The Doctor searches for the truth, Martha makes friends with the princess and Riley goes to help the engineers figure out what is happening to their water pipes.

On their seventh stop, Martha starts to wonder if she’s ended up in a relationship. Maybe it’s a little silly that she hasn’t thought about it until now – what with all the hand-holding and kissing and talks over food – but it’s been a while and, well, they’re in a high stress environment where these things just…happen. But this is different, this is 1969 and just…living, Angels and lost TARDIS aside. This is Riley asking questions about a world several centuries away from his and holding her hand as they walk down the street. 

Martha hasn’t dated much, not seriously. There were a few boys she thinks might have been interested in her beyond a casual night out, but she had school and residency and friends and family to fill up all her time as it was. Riley respects her skills, just as he’s confident in his own. They’ve faced down death, disaster and the Doctor in a strop together. It’s hard to remember that she’d once occasionally wished to have the Doctor to herself. They know each other. She’s starting to think that they might be able to make it beyond the worst circumstances.

“When all this is sorted out,” she says that night, leaning against his shoulder, “I think you should meet my family.”


End file.
